Coorabell Hall Film Club
Wednesday 5 March

Food & drinks (Licensed) from 6.00PM
Movie starts at 7.30PM

UP (2009)

Winner of 2 Academy Awards

This is a wonderful film, with characters who are as believable as any characters can be who spend much of their time floating above the rain forests of Venezuela. They have tempers, problems and obsessions. They are cute and goofy, but they aren’t cute in the treacly way of little cartoon animals. Two of the three central characters are cranky old men and the third important character is a nervy kid.

This is another masterwork from Pixar, which is leading the charge in modern animation. The movie was directed by Pete Docter, who also directed Monsters, Inc., wrote Toy Story and was a co-writer on WALL-E.

The story begins with a romance as sweet and lovely as any in feature animation. Young Carl and Ellie meet and discover they share the same dream of someday being explorers. In newsreels, they see the exploits of a daring adventurer named Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), who uses his gigantic airship to explore the Tepui plateau in Venezuela (inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World) and then bring back the bones of fantastic creatures previously unknown to man. When his discoveries are accused of being faked, he flies off enraged to Venezuela again, vowing to bring back living creatures to prove his claims.

Nothing is heard from Muntz for years. Ellie and Carl (Edward Asner) grow up, fall in love, marry, buy a ramshackle house and turn it into their dream home, are happy together and grow old. The focus is now on Carl’s life after Ellie. He becomes a recluse, holds out against the world, keeps his home as a memorial, talks to the absent Ellie. One day he decides to pack up and literally fly away. Having worked all his life as a balloon man, he has the equipment on hand to suspend the house from countless helium-filled balloons and fulfill his dream. What he wasn’t counting on was an inadvertent stowaway, young Russell (Jordan Nagai), a dutiful Scout earning his Wilderness Explorer badge.

The adventures on the Tepui plateau are satisfying in a Mummy/Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones sort of way. But they aren’t the whole point of the film. There are stakes here, and personalities involved, and two old men battling for meaning in their lives. And a kid who, for once, isn’t smarter than all the adults. And a loyal dog. And an animal sidekick. And always that house and those balloons.